Last night at about 4pm, I decided to knock off work a little early to take my 4-year-old to the pool. His older brother had his tonsils out last week, so he hasn’t gotten much attention lately. We enjoyed an hour of sunshine, cool water, and mother/son bonding at the pool (ok, maybe I took my laptop with me and worked part of the time, but he enjoyed swimming for an hour!).
I got home exhausted and got dinner ready for the kids.
That’s when I received this message…
“Hi Tiffany, it’s Tierney. I’m trying to get to my website, http://totalbodybar.com, and it’s bringing up a completely different website. I don’t know what to do. My clients can’t logon to schedule classes. If you can call me back as soon as you can, that would be great.”
I absolutely love hearing from my site management clients. I love it when you request new feature, add images, and ask for content updates, because adding content to your website is going to help build your business. That’s what we are all about at 8 Signal!
What I never like to hear is that one of our clients is having a technical issue with their site. Every minute your site is down is a minute that your customers aren’t buying, that new leads aren’t finding out how you can improve their lives, and that your website isn’t helping your business generate revenue. That is why we strive to provide our El Paso and Las Cruces clients with reliable website hosting service.
Don’t panic, we’ve got you covered
I might not like getting that call in the middle of dinner, but I am always happy to resolve a problem so that you don’t have to worry about your website. I never hesitate to jump in to a rough situation in order to solve a problem or advocate for a client’s business.
Within seconds of receiving Tierney’s message, I was on the phone with her attempting to pull up her site. Sure enough, her site was gone and was replaced with a “temporary” replacement site. My next step was to pull up other sites on our server to see if it was a site-specific problem or a server-wide problem. Sure enough NONE of the sites on our server were working.
I jumped off the line with Tierney, and within five minutes had my tech gurus working to diagnose and resolve the issue. Less than 20 minutes after I got Tierney’s message, every one of our sites was back up and running.
There’s no such thing as 100% website uptime
Uptime is word you’ll hear often when it comes to websites and website hosting. No one wants their website to become unavailable or to experience downtime. But the truth is, 100% uptime doesn’t really exist. If a hosting company is promising 100% uptime on your website, you might want to to see if it comes with a unicorn and flying pigs.
Every website hosting server will experience downtime sooner or later.
The really big dogs in cyberspace are able to minimize website downtime by paying for multiple hosting accounts on multiple servers. That redundancy means that when one server goes down, another one, outside of that network, is there to provide backup. Even still, sites like Twitter, Flickr, and even Facebook experience downtime now and then. This is great if you’ve got deep pockets, but unless you are the New York Times or Huffington Post you probably don’t need to invest the extra money to go from 99% uptime to 100% uptime.
“I’m just glad I had someone to call…”
Ruben and I offer our sincerest apology to our hosting clients who experienced a brief downtime yesterday. We are always striving to make sure our hosting service is top quality, but when we mess up we’ll be the first to admit it.
Tierney was so relieved when I got her website back up so her customers could resume scheduling their classes. Here’s what she had to say about the experience:
“I panicked when I saw my site was down. My clients depend on my site every single day to schedule and pay for their classes. I am just so glad I had someone to call; an actual person I know, not just some call center in another country. Rather than having to call tech support myself, explain a problem I don’t understand, and speak a tech language I don’t know, all I had to do was leave Tiffany a 30-second voice mail message. She had it taken care of in less time than I would have been on hold with the average website hosting company’s tech support line. This is exactly why I work with 8 Signal. I love knowing they’re there for me when I need them!”
Dealing with tech support isn’t fun. That is why 8 Signal is here for you!
Downtime isn’t the only thing that can go wrong
One of the fears that Tierney express was that her site had been hacked. As I discussed a few months ago in this post about website security threats, hacking is a real and present issue on the internet today.
The other day I had a potential website management customer tell me, “We don’t need are website backed up. We don’t store any sensitive information or collect payments on our site, so we’re not worried about hacking.” Not having sensitive data on your site will definitely make it easier to recover from a hack, but it doesn’t mean your site won’t get hacked.
A website hacker interested in identity theft is going to target a bank or a big brand store like Target. The hackers who are probably actively attempting your hack your site right now are more interested in using your site to spam or sell something, or they’re going to harness the power of your site to hack into more powerful websites. And, of course, there are those who just hack because they can. Like every other vandal, they just enjoy destroying things.
What if…
At 8 Signal, we stay on top of industry trends and best practices to keep your website site. That doesn’t mean that sites are 100% completely safe from hacking. We do our best to keep your site safe, but what if the worst happens?
One of the services we include as part of all of our hosting and website management plans is website backups. We backup the database of your site on a weekly basis, and we backup your entire site on a monthly basis.
If your site gets hacked we’ve got an expert on our team who can have your site diagnosed and restored, normally within 24 hours. Then, we place advanced monitoring on that site for at least 30 days after the hack to ensure that there isn’t a reinfection of malware or viruses.
We hope your website never experiences downtime, gets hacked, or has any other technical issues. However, if it does, aren’t you glad we are here for you?
Does your hosting company provide that level of support? If not, contact us today to find out how you can become of of 8 Signal’s Hosting and Website Maintenance customers.
